PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep 4, 2024--
You.com, an AI-powered productivity engine, today announced a $50 million Series B funding round led by Georgian, a growth-stage B2B investor. The round included participation from Salesforce Ventures, NVIDIA, SBVA (formerly Softbank Ventures Asia), DuckDuckGo, and Day One Ventures, bringing You.com’s total funding to $99 million. Since launching in November 2021, You.com has served 1 billion queries and has millions of active users across hedge funds, tech unicorns, and multiple publicly traded companies. Its ARR has grown by 500% since January 2024.
You.com was founded by Richard Socher, former Chief Scientist at Salesforce and the fourth most-cited NLP researcher, and Bryan McCann, former lead AI research scientist at Salesforce. They were the first to embed large language models (LLMs) into a search experience before ChatGPT. In 2017, while at Salesforce, they invented contextualized word vectors, leading to the biggest improvements in search since Google Search. Their 2018 DecaNLP paper pioneered prompt engineering and helped the field see it was possible to train a single model for multiple tasks, a milestone acknowledged by GPT's creators at OpenAI.
"When we first started You.com, we saw an opportunity to reinvent the gateway to everyone’s online journey. Billions of questions were being answered every day with a list of blue links, but our users wanted more. We built You.com to enhance productivity, inspire new thinking, and develop a deeper understanding of the world through human-AI collaboration. Our AI agents help millions of knowledge workers be more productive, whether it’s through fast, accurate answers, research and analysis, problem-solving, or content creation,” said Richard Socher, co-founder and CEO of You.com.
Inaccuracy remains the number one challenge for AI adoption in the workplace. Even tech giants struggle with accuracy, including factual errors in product demos to misleading AI-generated content in search results. Current AI solutions often aren’t reliable and fail to cite sources properly.
Socher added: “It’s easy to make a quick prototype with an LLM. It’s difficult to make them accurate at scale. Our focus at You.com has been making LLMs more trustworthy. In December 2022, we were the first consumer-facing LLM with internet access, providing up-to-date answers with verifiable citations. Since then, we’ve built an entire AI operating system that’s model agnostic to provide the most comprehensive and accurate responses.”
Beginning today, You.com is introducing multiplayer AI with its Team plan, moving beyond just a single-worker mode to a collaborative, team-oriented experience. You.com already offers advanced proprietary AI agents for research and problem-solving — third-party benchmarked for unparalleled accuracy — and lets people create custom AI agents on top of any AI model for any task.
With this multiplayer approach, teams will be able to build, share, and discover Custom Agents, exchange chat threads, access unlimited file uploads with no data retention concerns, and more. Companies can also integrate You.com’s APIs to enhance their products with AI and information from the web.
“At Georgian, our investment team experienced the time savings You.com provides for the extensive market research and synthesis work we do every day - we were particularly impressed by the agentic capabilities of You.com’s ‘Research Agent,’” said Margaret Wu, Lead Investor at Georgian. “When Georgian's AI Lab diligenced the technical strength behind You.com’s AI productivity engine, we saw the platform’s B2B potential. And, we believe that You.com’s deep bench of talent and technical expertise will continue to position the company ahead of competitors in a quickly evolving market.”
Through user conversations with early adopters, You.com also identified AI sprawl as a major challenge, with people paying over $1,000 annually across numerous subscriptions to access various models. Businesses need help to keep up with rapid advancements in LLMs, as new and better models frequently emerge, driving demand for an all-in-one AI platform to avoid vendor lock-in. You.com addresses this by offering access to the latest and most powerful LLMs, enhanced with live web access for unparalleled accuracy, and automatically routing a user’s query to the best model for the job.
You.com offers team and enterprise site licenses starting at $25/month per seat when billed annually. Visit Enterprise Site Licenses or access its APIs for more information.
About You.com:
You.com is collaborative AI — for you, your team, and your business. You.com AI Agents maximize the productivity of knowledge workers through fast and accurate research and analysis, complex problem solving, content creation, and more. The company’s suite of APIs and end-to-end solutions drive revenue for businesses by becoming the foundation AI agent layer for their products and services. Founded by leading AI research scientists Richard Socher and Bryan McCann, You.com has raised $99 million from investors including, Marc Benioff’s Time Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, NVIDIA, SBVA, Georgian Ventures, Radical Ventures, Day One Ventures, Breyer Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, DuckDuckGo, Untapped Ventures, and others.
About Georgian:
Georgian invests in high-growth B2B software companies and builds software to help those companies scale faster. We seek to identify and accelerate leading growth-stage software companies in our thesis areas of Applied AI, Conversational AI, Trust and Product-Led Purpose. Based in Toronto, Georgian's team brings together investors with machine learning professionals, software entrepreneurs and experienced operators. Founded in 2008, Georgian has US$5.6B AUM, as of December 31, 2023. Visit www.georgian.io for more information.
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KEYWORD: CALIFORNIA UNITED STATES NORTH AMERICA
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SOURCE: You.com
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PUB: 09/04/2024 09:00 AM/DISC: 09/04/2024 09:01 AM
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